Long and short I've been wasting time, most of it playing xbox live and mmorg's like Destiny and Defiance (just in case you want to know I like Defiance better) . . . but I've gotten the itch to get back into designing as by far it is the one thing that helps me keep slightly more sane.
So to the point . . . I'm thinking of rehashing a lot of my ideas and one theme is popping up in my mind constantly. It's an idea involving layers of armor and weapon penetration vs weapon damage.
What I'm thinking of is more of a more modern styled game then I have done before, including firearms, but the more than the fire arms is the 'munitions' used. Ie Full-metal-jacket vs Lead-point- vs wad-cutters and what would happen/should happen when those items hit targets of various armor levels (Ie un-armored vs light-armor vs heavy-armor).
What I am considering is a table/chart of some-type (possibly a round one), that illustrated the various layers a pc and npc could have, with the center of the diagram being the vitals, the next layer structure (ie bone), then flesh/tissue (need another generic layer term for this) with at least two other layers being armor and over lay (I'm planing over lay to be basic one hit ceramic (or similar material) type stuff that shatters easily but has massive penetration stopping abilities.)
Now the theory I'm working on is that the ammo used to cause damage to armored targets would be less effective against unarmored targets and vice-versa. So a fmj round designed for punching through say at least two levels of armor would pass cleanly through an unarmored target doing minimal damage. Now this causes me to think that I'll not only need a penetration stat for ammo, but also two types of damage stats one for the amount of damage caused by the passing of the round and a second for the amount of damage caused when the round finally reaches it's penetration limit.
And if we flip the scenario around and have a wad-cutter round designed for causing massive tissue damage, hit an armored target it would be basically wasted, though it might cause knock-back/stagger upon impact, and yes I do want to include effects like stagger and shock when impacted by rounds, or even melee weapons.
what I'm trying to figure is should it be a diagram, with a set number of boxes/segments to indicate over all damage to each layer, or would a set of just listed values be more welcoming/easier?
Also I do understand calibre would impact these values as well, as a .22lr can pass through a human, like a .50 cal can, but the shock from the .50cal and size of the wound track would be exponentially more devastating (more like lethal) to an un-armored target that the same wound track for the .22lr, but calibre aside (just for now) is the thought.idea of weapon penetration, wound tracks and diagrams getting overly complicated for a possible one of system.